The aim of this study is to analyse the popular perception of the walking dead – ‘revenants’ – in medieval England, using both written and archaeological sources. The opening chapter defines the methodology for conducting an interdisciplinary investigation into literary and material ‘texts’. Chapter two investigates the strategies used by the Church to prescribe the rules for a ‘good’ death performance. This will include a brief overview of the evolution of the Western funerary rite from the Roman period to the fifteenth century. The third chapter examines the specific codicological placement of the revenant narratives in William of Newburgh’s Historia Rerum Anglicarum (c.1198), and explores the theological, political and cultural contexts which prompted their transcription and circulation. This examination of the ‘social logic’ of the walking dead will include a critical analysis of the ‘Buckingham Ghost’ narrative. Motifs of pestilence and the spreading of social/physical disorder, so evident in the William’s Historia, are investigated in chapter four. The percipients’ negotiation of religious doctrine, humoural theory, and the traditions of ‘folk’ medicine will be used to explicate why some revenants were considered contagious. The relationship between the somatic experience of the revenant attack and the ‘nightmare’ is also given consideration in this chapter. The final section of this study involves an exploration of the material strategies used to allay the walking dead. I contend that it is indeed possible to draw intertextual analogies between the written sources and unusual/deviant burial practices. The way in which medico-magical knowledge (discussed in chapter four) was utilised to protect the living from the pestilential dead is given special consideration. The aim of chapter five, then, is to analyse the evidence for the fear of the errant corpse in mortuary and landscape contexts. In short, I argue that smaller (unwritten) traditions could be improvised within the prevailing habitus of the local community to form idiosyncratic patterns, or ‘rhetorics’, of apotropaic response.

Este estudo investiga a personificação da morte como um dos grandes elementos de ruptura entre a literatura portuguesa tradicional e a contemporânea e como subsídio para reflexão acerca da realidade pós-moderna portuguesa. Diante de uma tradição estagnada em torno do lirismo, surgem produções artísticas que buscaram matéria literária no imaginário europeu para desenvolver uma literatura de cunho crítico. A importância do imaginário da morte medieval como referência cultural é comprovada através da gama de iconografias e de textos escritos encontrados ao longo dos tempos, inclusive na contemporaneidade e na preservação de festas populares ainda no século 21. Seguindo essa tendência, a personificação da morte é o elemento central desenvolvido no romance de José Saramago As intermitências da morte, e de Augusto Abelaira O triunfo da morte, literatura pós-74, como via para renovação literária e exercício crítico da sociedade. Também é através da figura da morte que são desenvolvidos três conceitos pós-modernos: ruptura entre ficção e realidade, paródia e ironia. Essas abordagens são trabalhadas a partir da teoria de Käte Hamburger e Linda Hutcheon, entre outros, em função da possibilidade de unir o tema da morte e a teoria pós-moderna no percurso teórico específico definido neste estudo. / This study investigates the death personification as one of the great elements of rupture between the Portuguese Traditional Literature and the Contemporary Literature as a subsidy for reflection on the Portuguese post-modern reality. Facing a stagnant tradition around the lyric, artistic productions appear which searched literary subject from the European imaginary to develop a literature on a critical way. The importance of the imaginary of medieval death as a cultural reference is proved through a great deal of iconographies and from written texts found along the ages also in the contemporaneity and in the preservation of popular parties and feasts still in the 21st century. Following this tendency, the death personification is the central element developed in the novel by José Saramago As intermitências da morte, and by Augusto Abelaira O Triunfo da morte, literature post-74, seen as a way to literature renovation as well as a critical society exercise. It is also through the death figure that three post-modern concepts are developed: rupture between fiction and reality, parody and irony. These approaches are worked and developed from the theory by Käte Hamburger and Linda Hutcheon, among others, because of the possibility of uniting the death theme and the post-modern theory on the theory specific course defined in this study.

Este estudo investiga a personificação da morte como um dos grandes elementos de ruptura entre a literatura portuguesa tradicional e a contemporânea e como subsídio para reflexão acerca da realidade pós-moderna portuguesa. Diante de uma tradição estagnada em torno do lirismo, surgem produções artísticas que buscaram matéria literária no imaginário europeu para desenvolver uma literatura de cunho crítico. A importância do imaginário da morte medieval como referência cultural é comprovada através da gama de iconografias e de textos escritos encontrados ao longo dos tempos, inclusive na contemporaneidade e na preservação de festas populares ainda no século 21. Seguindo essa tendência, a personificação da morte é o elemento central desenvolvido no romance de José Saramago As intermitências da morte, e de Augusto Abelaira O triunfo da morte, literatura pós-74, como via para renovação literária e exercício crítico da sociedade. Também é através da figura da morte que são desenvolvidos três conceitos pós-modernos: ruptura entre ficção e realidade, paródia e ironia. Essas abordagens são trabalhadas a partir da teoria de Käte Hamburger e Linda Hutcheon, entre outros, em função da possibilidade de unir o tema da morte e a teoria pós-moderna no percurso teórico específico definido neste estudo. / This study investigates the death personification as one of the great elements of rupture between the Portuguese Traditional Literature and the Contemporary Literature as a subsidy for reflection on the Portuguese post-modern reality. Facing a stagnant tradition around the lyric, artistic productions appear which searched literary subject from the European imaginary to develop a literature on a critical way. The importance of the imaginary of medieval death as a cultural reference is proved through a great deal of iconographies and from written texts found along the ages also in the contemporaneity and in the preservation of popular parties and feasts still in the 21st century. Following this tendency, the death personification is the central element developed in the novel by José Saramago As intermitências da morte, and by Augusto Abelaira O Triunfo da morte, literature post-74, seen as a way to literature renovation as well as a critical society exercise. It is also through the death figure that three post-modern concepts are developed: rupture between fiction and reality, parody and irony. These approaches are worked and developed from the theory by Käte Hamburger and Linda Hutcheon, among others, because of the possibility of uniting the death theme and the post-modern theory on the theory specific course defined in this study.

Este estudo investiga a personificação da morte como um dos grandes elementos de ruptura entre a literatura portuguesa tradicional e a contemporânea e como subsídio para reflexão acerca da realidade pós-moderna portuguesa. Diante de uma tradição estagnada em torno do lirismo, surgem produções artísticas que buscaram matéria literária no imaginário europeu para desenvolver uma literatura de cunho crítico. A importância do imaginário da morte medieval como referência cultural é comprovada através da gama de iconografias e de textos escritos encontrados ao longo dos tempos, inclusive na contemporaneidade e na preservação de festas populares ainda no século 21. Seguindo essa tendência, a personificação da morte é o elemento central desenvolvido no romance de José Saramago As intermitências da morte, e de Augusto Abelaira O triunfo da morte, literatura pós-74, como via para renovação literária e exercício crítico da sociedade. Também é através da figura da morte que são desenvolvidos três conceitos pós-modernos: ruptura entre ficção e realidade, paródia e ironia. Essas abordagens são trabalhadas a partir da teoria de Käte Hamburger e Linda Hutcheon, entre outros, em função da possibilidade de unir o tema da morte e a teoria pós-moderna no percurso teórico específico definido neste estudo. / This study investigates the death personification as one of the great elements of rupture between the Portuguese Traditional Literature and the Contemporary Literature as a subsidy for reflection on the Portuguese post-modern reality. Facing a stagnant tradition around the lyric, artistic productions appear which searched literary subject from the European imaginary to develop a literature on a critical way. The importance of the imaginary of medieval death as a cultural reference is proved through a great deal of iconographies and from written texts found along the ages also in the contemporaneity and in the preservation of popular parties and feasts still in the 21st century. Following this tendency, the death personification is the central element developed in the novel by José Saramago As intermitências da morte, and by Augusto Abelaira O Triunfo da morte, literature post-74, seen as a way to literature renovation as well as a critical society exercise. It is also through the death figure that three post-modern concepts are developed: rupture between fiction and reality, parody and irony. These approaches are worked and developed from the theory by Käte Hamburger and Linda Hutcheon, among others, because of the possibility of uniting the death theme and the post-modern theory on the theory specific course defined in this study.

Factual accounts of revenants – the risen dead – seized the medieval imagination in the early eleventh century, and were recorded by serious historians and ecclesiastics as true. They then began to appear in secular imaginative literature and art, growing progressively more elaborate and frightening throughout the Middle Ages whilst retaining many of the religious overtones expressed overtly in the ecclesiastic tales. By the early modern and modern period, the tales were removed from any overt religious context and were told as purely imaginative literature. The academic half of this thesis explores the influence on the tales of the Christian doctrine of resurrection and the cult of the body of Christ and of the saints, then traces the migration of those tales into imaginative literature from the Middle Ages to the present. It identifies key motifs from the medieval chronicles and imaginative literature that continue to appear in modern stories, and explores the extent to which Christian eschatology altered perceptions of the dead and why, in an increasingly secular context, fascination with such tales continued into modern literature, what part fear of death played throughout this period, and how that fear was expressed, first in an ecclesiastical context, then in imaginative literature through horror stories. The creative half of my thesis is a literary fiction novel updating a medieval revenant tale, the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, to twenty-first century New England.

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